Weekly Update #139: Bomber, UI, next patch

Remember to wishlist Infinity: Battlescape if you haven't done so yet, thank you.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079620/Infinity_Battlescape/

Hey everybody, time for another update. Before I jump in to development news, I'm happy to announce that we'll be collaborating with Markus Zierhofer to produce Infinity: Battlescape's soundtrack. Markus is incredibly talented and the quality of his work so far gives us full confidence that he'll be able to nail down the musical style for Battlescape. You can listen to some of his work on his website.

Markus has already completed the main menu theme, and I can safely say that the entire team is in love with it. In the coming month or two he'll be producing a couple of ambient soundtracks, anticipation / thrill and finally battle tracks. We're in the middle of figuring out how to seamlessly blend all these tracks together based on the game's context dynamically.

We haven't determined yet if we'll patch the tracks into the game one by one as they're produced or if we'll wait a major patch in July / August to make them all available at once. More news on that in the coming weeks.



In other development news, Kristian has finished texturing the bomber. The bomber textures that were available in the backer's beta patch 0.4.6.0 were still a work in progress, so now Kristian has been able to finalize them - especially everything related to rusty edges, roughness and small scale details. Here's a screenshot of the updated bomber:







On the UI side, most widgets have been completed and are now functional. The UI code is getting integrated into the game and we're now ready to build the new star map or ship selection / upgrade screens. The goal is to have a first version available in the next patch, next week. It'll look pretty ugly at first, as we're spending no time on "making it look good" - functional is the keyword here. The first version will be very simple and will definitely be lacking, but in the next few months we'll continue to iterate on it until it's ready for Early access.

Speaking of the next patch, we'll probably be reverting the flight model experimental anti-drifting system introduced in the last patch. We didn't feel comfortable releasing the game without at least testing it once. It's possible that we'll keep it in a reduced form as an equipment, for capital ships only. Another change that we're thinking of introducing is aligning warp-out velocity to a target ( within bounds ) when a player disengages the warp drive. This should make it easier to catch up with a fleeing ship, which at the moment can be a frustrating experience.

That's it for now, more news next week for the new patch, and (hopefully) the first pics of the star map !

-Flavien Brebion